SYMHC Classics: Hatshepsut

This 2019 episode covers Hatshepsut, who sent a huge expedition to Punt in the 15th century B. C. E. The expedition to Punt is also an important and illustrative part of Hatshepsut’s reign. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argonix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 1:19Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 2:15Holly Frey?

  Happy Saturday. One of the finds on our recent installment of Unearthed was a pair of tombs that likely belonged to Thutmose II, half-brother and husband to Hatshepsut. Our episode on Hatshepsut and the voyage to Punt that took place during her reign is the subject of today's Saturday classic.

• 2:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  This originally came out July 3rd, 2019. Enjoy.

• 2:39Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:54Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  And it has been too long since we've had any African history on the show. We know this. It's one of those things where you look at the recent archive and go, wow, that has been a while. I really wanted to do an episode on the land of Punt, which is spelled P-U-N-T. So sometimes you'll also hear people pronounce it punt. And sometimes it's described as a kingdom, sometimes more of a massive trading center. But there are some really, really big holes in our knowledge of Punt that make it hard to do a whole episode on it. For example, we don't know exactly where it was. There are references to Punt in Egyptian writing that span about 2,000 years. And there's also mentions from elsewhere in the

• 3:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  world, but it's not totally clear whether all of these references are referring to the same place. But one of our biggest sources of information on Punt comes from Hatshepsut, who sent a huge expedition there in the 15th century BCE. This expedition to Punt is also an important and illustrative part of Hatshepsut's reign. So today, we're going to go to Punt by way of Hatshepsut.

• 4:01Holly Frey?

  And the civilization that we call ancient Egypt expanded and contracted in cycles for thousands of years, with periods of prospering and flourishing divided by periods of decline and instability. This is part of why I have not jumped on any African history recently, because I start delving in and then I go, whoa, whoa, whoa, this water's too deep. And I back up.

• 4:24Holly Frey?

  Egyptologists have roughly divided these prosperous eras into the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, separated by intermediary periods. These people knew their civilization by a number of names, including the Two Lands, the Beloved Land, and Kemet, which is usually translated as Black Land, often interpreted as a reference to the fertile soil that sits along the Nile River.

• 4:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  At Shepset was pharaoh near the start of the New Kingdom, which started with the founding of the 18th ruling dynasty. The 18th dynasty also included some of Egypt's most well-known pharaohs, including Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, and Tutankhamun. These kings did not call themselves pharaohs, though. That's a Greek term that was coined a little later and then kind of retroactively applied to all of the kings of this ancient kingdom.

• 5:14Holly Frey?

  The 18th dynasty was founded by Ammosa in about 1539 BCE. And after his death in about 1514 BCE, Ammosa was succeeded by his son, Amenhotep I. But when Amenhotep I died in about 1493 BCE, he did not have a male heir. So in that case, one of his generals, Tutmosa, was next on the throne.

• 5:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  Tutmosa married a woman named Ammosa, and it's not entirely clear who her parents were. One of her titles was "king's sister," but it's not totally known whether that came from being the sister of one of the previous kings or Tutmosa's own sister.

• 5:53Holly Frey?

  In this society, kings had a primary wife, known as the great royal wife, along with other lesser wives and concubines. And for much of ancient Egyptian history, it was typical for the king to take his sister or half-sister as his great royal wife and to marry his other sisters as well. The king was the embodiment of the god Horus, and a marriage to a sister or half-sister hearkened back to the Egyptian creation story. In this story, the first god, Atum, had no partner, so he created the first pair of deities by himself. This brother-sister pair then produced another brother-sister pair, and so on.

• 6:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the 18th Dynasty in particular, it was required for royal sisters to marry their brother kings and then for daughters of that pair to marry the next king. And in addition to the religious aspect that connected back to this creation story, this also really concentrated the power and the wealth within the royal family. So whether Thutmose was marrying his own sister or the sister of one of the previous kings, his doing this strengthened his claim to the throne and it preserved the idea of balance.

• 6:59Holly Frey?

  When Thutmose died, he and Ammosa had one daughter, Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut had been trained as a high priestess in the temple of Amun, who was head of the Egyptian pantheon, as well as patron deity of the kings in the city of Thebes during the new kingdom. Thutmose and Ammosa did not have a son, but Thutmose did have a son with one of his lesser wives, and that son was Thutmose II.

• 7:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thutmose II followed his father on the throne in about 1482 BCE, and he married his half-sister Hatshepsut, who was about 13 at the time. Because the new king was very young, inexperienced, and chronically ill, the king's great royal wife acted as his regent.

• 7:38Holly Frey?

  But Thutmose II did not live long after becoming king. He died in about 1479 BCE, after he had been on the throne for about three years. By that point, he and Hatshepsut had one daughter, Neferrera, and they did not have any sons. However, like his father, Thutmose II did have sons by other wives, including one by a woman named Isis. This was Thutmose III, who was about two years old at the time of his father's death.

• 8:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  A marriage was planned between Thutmose III and his half-sister Neferrera, and this would similarly strengthen his tie to the throne, although at the time, both of them were way too young to immediately get married. So in the meantime, Hatshepsut, Thutmose's the third stepmother and aunt, was going to act as his regent because his mother Isis wasn't of royal blood.

• 8:28Holly Frey?

  Up until this point, the line of succession in the 18th Dynasty had progressed in a way that was really pretty typical, apart from Thutmose I being a general who was not of royal birth. And it was also pretty common for a woman to act as regent if her husband died before his heir was old enough to rule on his own. It was more common for a woman to wind up in such a position of power at the end of the dynasty, though, when the late king had no male heir.

• 8:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  For the first few years after her husband's death, Hatshepsut's conduct as regent was pretty typical for the time as well. She built a memorial chapel to her late husband. She was publicly dedicated to preserving his memory and looking after the welfare of his sons. She took action on young Thutmose's behalf and guided him as he grew into the divine king on his own. She ordered the renewal and restorations of temples to honor the young king, and she sent an expedition to Aswan to quarry a pair of obelisks that would be dedicated to him. Writings about her from this time referred to her as queen or with her formal religious title as the kingdom's highest priestess, which was God's

• 9:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  wife of Amun. And her depictions and carvings were pretty typical for a woman in these positions.

• 9:42Holly Frey?

  But by the seventh year of her regency, that had started to change. She reported that the oracle of Amun had delivered a message from the god that she should be king, becoming co-ruler with her stepson. In her account, this happened at the temple of Karnak during a festival, when a statue of Amun was supposed to perform an oracle or miracle. At first, no message came, but when it finally did, the statue moved around dramatically and delivered a message to her that she was to be both her majesty and the god's wife.

• 10:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  She started to be depicted in artwork with both masculine and feminine traits. And after a while, she was shown as a man with the skirt and the decorative beard and the crown that signified her being king. She wasn't disguising her gender, though. The language that was used to describe her was still feminine most of the time, even as the artwork was depicting her as progressively more masculine. This was really something that happened over time, with some more masculine elements appearing long before the seventh year of her regency, and then with her depictions continuing to become more and more masculine as time passed.

• 10:50Holly Frey?

  And at some point, she was formally crowned in a series of rituals that took days to complete. As was typical for pharaohs, she took a new throne name, Maatkare, which translates roughly to "truth is the soul of Re." The idea of maat, or truth, in this context also connected to justice and order, and was a trait that was established by the gods. The role of the pharaoh was to mediate between the gods and humanity, preserving the gods Maat. There was also a goddess named Maat who was the personification of these traits.

• 11:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  She also banned construction of her mortuary temple known as Jaser Jaseru, or Holy of Holies. This was built at the Deir El-Bahari Temple Complex near what's now Luxor. This temple was meant to guide her into the afterlife, where as pharaoh, she would transcend into a divine being, and it was to make sure that she was well provided for there. The tomb to actually hold her mummy was built in another location. Hatshepsut's mortuary temple was a massive, three-tiered temple made from sandstone, full of statuary, including statues of Hatshepsut as the god Osiris. The structure itself still stands today.

• 12:00Holly Frey?

  Relief carvings on the temple walls documented Hatshepsut's biography and her rule as king. This included a news story documenting her birth, that the god Amun had disguised himself as Thutmose I and impregnated Hatshepsut's mother. Both her throne name and her new origin story reinforced the idea that she had a legitimate claim to be king, and that she was connected directly to the god Amun, who had authorized her to do it.

• 12:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although she was technically co-ruler with Thutmose III, for the rest of his life, she acted as the sole monarch. She also changed his throne name from one that meant "The manifestation of Re is enduring" to one that meant "The manifestation of the soul of Re is enduring," kind of adding a degree of separation between him and being a direct manifestation of the god.

• 12:51Holly Frey?

  And it's not entirely clear what motivated her to do this. When archaeologists first unearthed her tomb in the 19th century, they concluded that she was power-hungry and conniving, and had stolen the throne from her stepson for her own selfish reasons. And we're going to talk about why they came to that conclusion in just a bit.

• 13:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  More recent scholars have pretty much dismissed that idea, though. While simple ambition might have been involved, it's also possible that there was some kind of threat to Thutmose III, and that Hatshepsut was protected. Him by becoming the king herself. It might have been just that he had been king under a regency for about seven years and he still wasn't old enough to father an heir. It would probably be another seven or so years before he could actually rule the kingdom on his own. That was a lot of time to get through in a world where early deaths were really common. And it's also possible that her doing this wasn't actually her idea, that it was something that advisors or the priesthood thought was necessary for some reason.

• 13:52Holly Frey?

  Regardless, she could not have done this without significant support among the ruling class. She had carefully cultivated relationships and alliances for years as regent before taking on the role of king. What she did was unprecedented, but the elite in Thebes allowed her to do it. And the fact that they did suggest that she was admired and respected as a leader before she took the throne.

• 14:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's clear that regardless of what the motivations were, she was incredibly savvy to do this. And she also proved herself to be a capable ruler, which we will talk about after a sponsor break.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 14:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hey, everybody, it's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

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• 14:59Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:05Speaker 04

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• 15:11Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:22Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:25Speaker 05

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• 15:29Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:11Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:35Holly Frey?

  We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 17:17Holly Frey?

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• 17:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends,

• 18:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 18:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  We talked before the break about how before Hatshepsut became king, the line of succession had unfolded in the 18th dynasty in a pretty typical way. But Hatshepsut's ascension to the throne wasn't typical at all. There were other women who had held positions of power in Egyptian history, but for one to take the throne in this way was really unprecedented. So in addition to her throne name and the revised story of her birth, she got to work immediately taking steps to try to reinforce the idea that she was a legitimate ruler.

• 19:16Holly Frey?

  She commissioned hundreds of statues and other artwork depicting her as king, along with statues and structures honoring the god Amun. She expanded the priesthood and constructed temples all over Thebes and beyond, including a bark chapel that French archaeologists named the Chapelle Rouge after unearthing the blocks used to build it in the 1920s. The chapel's original location is unknown. It was dismantled after Hatshepsut's death, and its blocks were used for a pylon in Karnak. She employed- Craftspeople associated with some of the kingdom's most prominent families to do all of this, building up her base of support.

• 19:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hatshepsut launched two military expeditions into Nubia, one of which she reportedly led herself. She also sent expeditions to mine gold in Nubia and in the eastern desert. She strengthened trading relationships with other parts of Africa and with the Levant, possibly as far west as what's now Afghanistan. Shortly after taking the throne, she also dispatched a massive trading expedition to Punt, which we'll be talking about in more detail in a bit.

• 20:20Holly Frey?

  And throughout all of this, she gave favors to prominent men who support she needed to stay in power. But she also made appointments to political newcomers, which gave her support that did not come with as many strings attached.

• 20:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the 15th year of her rule, Hatshepsut sent another expedition to Aswan to quarry a second set of obelisks, with this pair being inscribed to her. A year later, she held a jubilee festival known as Sed, something that was typically done in the 30th year of a king's rule to rejuvenate his power. It's possible that she chose this earlier date, because it was about 30 years since her father had died, at which point she had become her husband's queen. So in a way, that marked the beginning of her time on the throne.

• 21:03Holly Frey?

  At some point, she had her father's mummy moved to a tomb near her mortuary temple, again reinforcing her connection to the dynastic line. She also increasingly focused on her right to rule as coming from being her father's daughter, rather than her having been married to Thutmose II.

• 21:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  During her time on the throne, Hatshepsut's most powerful advisor was a man named Senenmut. We don't know all that much about him as a person. He started out as the overseer of the large hall at the palace in Thebes, starting at the very beginning of Thutmose II's reign. He soon took on an increasing number of political appointments and became tutor to Hatshepsut's daughter. By the time Hatshepsut took the throne, he had become incredibly powerful and a very important figure. He ultimately amassed 93 different official titles and became chief architect of Hatshepsut's mortuary temple. He oversaw treasuries and craftspeople all over the kingdom.

• 22:00Holly Frey?

  There's been some speculation that the two of them were linked romantically. Some of it stems from the fact that he was very close to Hatshepsut's daughter, leading people to wonder whether he was actually her father. He also built his burial temple near Hatshepsut's mortuary temple. Also, Senenmut was a powerful man in the court of a woman, which has frequently caused for suspicion. Although it's likely that Hatshepsut had other relationships after her husband's death, she would have had to have been really careful about one involving Senenmut.

• 22:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Senenmut disappears from the historical record in the 19th year of Hatshepsut's rule, although he might have survived after her death. She died in her early 40s after having ruled as king for about 15 years and as Thutmose III's regent for about seven years before that. This makes her the longest reigning female monarch in ancient Egyptian history and possibly the first to rule as a king rather than a regent or other interim ruler. As we noted earlier, there were other women who served as regents or who grew into having a lot of power as queens, and there's some debate about whether any of these earlier women became kings in their own right.

• 23:10Holly Frey?

  After Hatshepsut's death, Thutmose III became the sole ruler. It's clear from his time as king that Hatshepsut had prepared him to be a skilled leader from both a military and a political perspective. He had begun marrying and fathering children by his late teens, and by the time he was 20, he was commander of the military. After Hatshepsut's death, he conquered much of what is now Syria, as well as parts of Sudan and Iraq. The first of these expeditions took place almost immediately after he became the sole monarch. It seems as though Hatshepsut had started making preparations for it before her death.

• 23:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Like Hatshepsut had done, Thutmose III also undertook huge building projects, constructing temples and having obelisks quarried in Aswan. He also completed monuments to her that were already underway when she died. But then about 20 years into his reign, Thutmose III started construction of a new temple, which was next to Hatshepsut's mortuary temple. And at about this time, people started removing all references to Hatshepsut as king from temples and other buildings all over the kingdom.

• 24:16Holly Frey?

  Statues depicting her as king were smashed. Relief carvings were defaced. Her name was chiseled out of the reliefs at Jossair Jossaru and replaced with the names of Thutmose I, the second, and the third. Her mortuary temple was re-consecrated and her obelisks at Karnak were walled in. Her name was also removed from the official lists of kings. It is generally concluded that Thutmose III ordered this purge, but it's not clear how much he was encouraged to do so by the priesthood or his advisors.

• 24:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  She wasn't entirely obliterated from the record, though. This destruction went on for the rest of Thutmose III's life, which was for about another decade. But there were so many statues and other depictions of Hatshepsut that some of them were still intact by the time he died.

• 25:04Holly Frey?

  With so much of her record destroyed, Hatshepsut soon fell into complete obscurity. The people who remembered and supported her eventually died. And without her name in the lists of kings, she seems to have been forgotten within a few generations. When her mortuary temple was unearthed in the 19th century, no one knew how to read hieroglyphics yet, so all of the smashed statues and other defacements were interpreted as simple vandalism or the work of grave robbers.

• 25:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Then in the 1820s, Jean-François Champollion built on earlier work by Thomas Young to decipher the hieroglyphic text on the Rosetta Stone. And then that paved the way for modern people to be able to read hieroglyphics. Champollion personally visited Hatshepsut's temple and was deeply confused by what he found there. In addition to all these replaced names, there were pictures of two kings standing side by side. That was incredibly unusual. There was also writing that just didn't make sense, that had feminine word forms when they expected masculine ones.

• 26:05Holly Frey?

  Eventually, archaeologists pieced together what had happened. That Hatshepsut had been Thutmose III's regent, but had taken the throne herself. But they erroneously concluded that Thutmose had immediately removed Hatshepsut's name from the record as soon as she died. They imagined that Thutmose was angry at having had his kingship stolen from him for more than a decade, and that his removal of his stepmother's name was evidence of both his outrage and her character. Based on this assumption, they concluded that Hatshepsut was a stereotypical evil stepmother, right out of a Disney movie, wicked and conniving and only interested in her own power.

• 26:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  But today, we know that about 20 years passed between Hatshepsut's death and the defacement of her tomb and all the other destruction. And the interpretation of what led to that defacement is much different. That's largely thanks to the work of Egyptologist Charles Nims in 1966, who was the first person to pinpoint the date of the defacement as being the 42nd year of Thutmose II's reign. According to some researchers, it was even later than that. So it's more likely that the ruling class became interested in preserving the idea that the dynastic line had continued without any kind of interruption through Thutmose I, II, and III.

• 27:25Holly Frey?

  It's also possible that there was some concern about Thutmose III's successor, Amenhotep II. Thutmose did eventually marry Hatshepsut's daughter Neferrera, and he had a son, either with her or with another royal wife, but both of them died. So his successor was Amenhotep II, whose mother had no royal lineage and no connection back to Hatshepsut. It seems that Thutmose III was concerned enough about the line of succession that he had Amenhotep crowned while he was still living, with the two of them acting as co-monarchs.

• 27:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  So this removal of Hatshepsut from the record might have been connected to all this uncertainty. And it's also possible that the purge wouldn't have been considered necessary if Hatshepsut's daughter had survived and she had become the mother to the next king, rather than the king's wife coming from this totally disconnected lineage.

• 28:17Holly Frey?

  The idea of a female king is also an affront to the concept of maat that we talked about earlier. The king was supposed to be an intermediary with the gods and a living embodiment of Horus, keeping everything in balance. So having a woman in this role was basically the opposite of this idea of ordered justice. The fact that a woman had a relatively peaceful and prosperous reign in spite of this affront to maat may have raised unwelcome questions. About that divine order and the rule of other kings.

• 28:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hatshepsut's mummy wasn't placed in the tomb where she intended it to be, or if it was, it was later moved. But a mummy from a tomb that was found in the Valley of the Kings in 1902 might be hers. That tomb was fully excavated, starting in 1920.

• 29:03Holly Frey?

  During the excavation, archaeologists found the mummies of two women, one of which was on the floor. One of these was later identified as Hatshepsut's wet nurse. The other one, the one that had been on the floor, was positioned in a way that was often used for royal women. A CT scan found that it was missing a tooth. Meanwhile, a box marked with Hatshepsut's cartouche had been unearthed as well in a cache of royal mummies. A scan of that box revealed that it contained a tooth, and this tooth appears to be a match for the mummy's missing one. So it's likely that this was Hatshepsut's mummy, although that is still not 100% proven.

• 29:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, there was discussion of using DNA to try to confirm everything back when these initial analyses happened. I don't know what the results of that were. I could not find reference to it anywhere, but it's also incredibly difficult to get good DNA out of mummified samples that are this old. Anyway, this finally brings us to the voyage to Punt that I wanted to focus on from the beginning, and we will get to that after a sponsor break.

• 30:15Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers. Influencers and real people trying these trends.

• 30:57Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Help Versus Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 32:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:18Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 33:02Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 33:30Speaker 06

  Live Right, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 34:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  The first reference to Punt in ancient Egyptian writing is from the Palermo Stone, which dates back to about 2,500 BCE. That was more than 1,000 years before Hatshepsut became king. According to the Palermo Stone, King Suhura sent an expedition to Punt, which returned with 80,000 measures of a substance that's generally written as NTYW, sometimes preceded by an apostrophe. Some sources translate this word as frankincense and others translate it as myrrh. Both of these are made from aromatic tree resins and are used to make perfumes and incense, as well as spices and medicine. This expedition also brought back wood in the form of rods or staves, which were probably used to make spears and other

• 34:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  weapons, because the Egyptian kingdom's territory at that time didn't include trees that yielded wood that was good for that purpose.

• 34:57Holly Frey?

  There are periodic references to Punt, also known as God's Land, in Egyptian writing after that. All of the documented expeditions were associated with kings who were known for exceptional leadership and good fortune. There are also fictional references, including the tale of the shipwrecked sailor. This story dates back to the Middle Kingdom. And in it, a sailor washes up on an island in the Red Sea and meets the Lord of Punt. The Lord of Punt is a serpent who gives him all kinds of gifts, including myrrh, eye paint, baboons, and elephant tusks.

• 35:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  Egyptian documents describe two different routes to Punt. One of them is along the Red Sea and one is along the Nile. Both of them involve some time on the Nile as well as travel over land. For the Red Sea route, ships were probably built on the Nile and then they sailed to Coptos. From there, they were disassembled and then carried along a dry riverbed called the Wadi Hammamet. And that went all the way to the Red Sea, which was 120 miles or 193 kilometers away. Then on the return trip, the goods probably would have been loaded onto pack animals to be carried back across the Wadi Hammamet. And then they would have been loaded into different ships on the Nile rather than

• 36:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  deconstructing the ships and carrying them again. It was an involved process. You would only want to go to this place if it took that much effort, if you were going to get some really good trade goods out of it.

• 36:23Holly Frey?

  You really had to want to do it.

• 36:27Holly Frey?

  To travel along the Nile, ships would have used rowers and sails to travel south against the current and then followed the current back. But it's not clear exactly where the overland portion was headed after getting off of the ships.

• 36:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Whether an expedition traveled along the Red Sea or stuck mostly to the Nile might have been a matter of practicality with the Egyptians traveling farther down the Nile when they had friendly relationships with the kingdoms and empires in that area, but then crossing over the land and traveling down the Red Sea when they didn't. Or it could have been that Punt was very large and stretched all the way from the Red Sea to the Nile and that Egyptians visited different parts of it at different times.

• 37:07Holly Frey?

  Like we mentioned at the top of the show, Hatshepsut's expedition to Punt was one of the most notable acts in her time as king. And a lot of what we know about Punt comes from her documentation of those expeditions. According to the account in the relief carvings in Hatshepsut's mortuary temple, this voyage restored trade with Punt after an interruption of more than 200 years.

• 37:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  She had several probable reasons for wanting to embark on this expedition. One was simply access to luxury goods and aromatic resins. The resins in particular were really important for religious purposes. This might have been a reward for her supporters when she ascended to the throne, like they helped her get on the throne, and in return, she was going to give them access to all of this good trade. It was probably also a way to keep the army busy. Although it does appear that Hatshepsut led a couple of small military campaigns into Nubia, it wasn't generally considered appropriate for a woman to personally lead an army into battle. On top of that, there was just a lot more risk for her than there would be for a man in her position.

• 38:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  It would have been just catastrophic for an unprecedented female king to lead a military campaign that then failed. So Hatshepsut needed some other way to reinforce the idea that she was competent and accomplished and capable as king, and she needed something to do to keep the soldiers occupied, like having them go all the way to Punt.

• 38:31Holly Frey?

  And as was the case with her ascension to the throne, Hatshepsut's relief carvings show that this was divinely ordered, saying that the oracle had delivered a command that, quote, "The highways to the Myrrh terraces should be opened." This is a slightly different framing from how other pharaohs documented their expeditions to Punt, which more focused on Amun or Amun Re causing Punt to send their goods or causing the way to Punt to be opened.

• 38:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  The bahrleaves in Hatshepsut's temple depict large sailed ships, crewed with 30 rowers each, carrying goods from Egypt, including fruit, meat, bread, beer, and wine. They sail across the water, and based on the aquatic life that's shown in the carvings, that water is probably meant to be the Red Sea. Once they arrive in Punt, there are carvings of the region's trees, which might be the trees used to produce ebony, frankincense, or myrrh. There are also some fig trees. There are also depictions of huts with domed Roofs on stilts, which might have been houses or granaries.

• 39:33Holly Frey?

  From there, the reliefs show all kinds of goods being loaded back onto the ships, including herbs, wood, resins, gold, incense, and animal skins. There are also lots of live animals, including baboons, monkeys, cattle, and hounds. Enslaved people and their children are loaded into the ships as well. And cross-sections of the loaded ships show them just packed to the gills with goods.

• 39:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Once the goods arrive safely at Karnak Temple in Thebes, the Egyptians and the Puntite dignitaries who are returned with them are shown presenting Hatshepsut with the goods that they had brought. This includes live resin trees in baskets meant for transplanting. And Hatshepsut did transplant them around her mortuary temple. In the carvings, Hatshepsut also consecrates the best of all these goods to the god Amun.

• 40:23Holly Frey?

  The people of Punt appear in these depictions as well. They have dark reddish skin with long hair and goatee-like beards. The only ones whose names are mentioned are King Pirahu and his queen Ati. The queen is depicted as being very strikingly large, something that has led to a lot of commentary about her body. And a lot of it has started with the assumption that there was a pathological explanation for her body's shape and size. But it may have just been how she was built or a mark of status and wealth in her culture. By the way, if you look her up, be prepared to read some really gross and insulting things about her body in almost every single article.

• 41:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Including articles that are brand new. Almost no one had nothing ugly to say about what the queen of Punt looked like. These reliefs are very detailed, so it's likely that Hatshepsut sent artists with the expedition and ordered them to make very careful observations for the sake of these reliefs when they returned. And the reliefs are definitely our biggest single source of information about Punt, but there is still so much that we don't know. For one thing, we really don't know how the people of Punt referred to themselves. Punt is what is in Egyptian writing, but it's also echoed in things that came later, like Herodotus's history, which was written in the 5th century BCE.

• 41:41Holly Frey?

  And we also don't know exactly where it was. That's something people have been trying to figure out for more than 150 years. At first, researchers focused on the Arabian Peninsula. But as archaeologists unearthed more and more descriptions of Punt being to the south rather than to the east of the Egyptian kingdom, and more references of the goods being traded, they started focusing more on the stretch of the continent between Egyptian territory and the Horn of Africa.

• 42:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Many of the goods described as coming from Punt were native to this part of the African continent, but there's still a lot of room for speculation. This is especially true since the ancient Egyptians were certainly not Punt's only trading partner. So the goods that were available in Punt probably came from other parts of the world as well, both on the continent of Africa and elsewhere. Also, the domed huts and the stilt houses that are shown in the reliefs are more associated with central and western Africa than with the parts of the continent that were most likely to be accessed via the Red Sea and which archaeologists and other researchers have mostly focused on in this search.

• 42:45Holly Frey?

  Most, but not all, researchers have concluded that Punt was probably located somewhere along the Red Sea. But exactly where is still a mystery. Researchers have certainly put forth a lot of ideas, a lot of them simultaneously contradictory and well-supported. Most place Punt somewhere in what's now Eritrea, Ethiopia, or Somalia. In an article in the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Stanley Ballanda explores descriptions of Punt as "on the twin shores of the sea." And he interprets the account's description of where the expedition pitched their tents as "on both sides of the Red Sea." Based on that, he concludes that Punt lay along the Baal Al-Mandab Strait, with modern

• 43:28Holly Frey?

  Djibouti on one side and Yemen on the other, in both eastern Africa and the western Arabian Peninsula.

• 43:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 2010, researchers even tried to use oxygen isotope analysis to try to confirm Punt's location by studying the mummy of a baboon that had presumably been brought back from Punt. That research suggested that this baboon was from what's now Eritrea or eastern Ethiopia. And so they concluded that Punt might have covered all of that general area.

• 43:58Holly Frey?

  Major archaeological discovery could clear all this up. But right now, the biggest archaeological finds related to Punt are from the Egyptian harbor of Mersegoasis, known at the time as Sa, which show evidence of trade with Punt.

• 44:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Regardless, though, Punt seems to have existed as an important and thriving trading partner from roughly 2,500 BCE to about 600 BCE. The last Egyptian expedition that we know about took place under Ramses III in the 12th century BCE.

• 44:28Holly Frey?

  Ah, elusive Punt.

• 44:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. I'm very, you will also, if you go poking around on the internet, you will also find some more far-fetched and less well-supported ideas about it being in many far-flung places that are not in the immediate vicinity of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, which aren't really supported so much by what we know in terms of what's documented about Egyptian relationships with Punt and about what we know about Egyptians' seafaring capabilities, which weren't amazing. They could get up and down the Nile pretty well, but they really tended to stick very closely along the shore of the Red Sea.

• 45:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  They were not nearly as good as like getting out into the water away from that safety of land.

• 45:17Holly Frey?

  They were focusing more on architecture, and that is fine.

• 45:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. We should also note that in the modern era, there is a place called Puntland, which is part of Somalia, and we know that that was named after the land of Punt, but it's not clear that that was the same physical location.

• 45:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook URL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is [email protected]. You can find us all over social media at @MissedInHistory. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

• 46:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 46:24Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T guarantee. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 47:32Speaker 06

  Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 48:00Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 48:30Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.